nervous, but to the nerve-diseased; he
recommends such a cure with confidence.
Fight with the elements from morn to night,
fear nor cold nor wet, and the cure will come
of itself. Nerve-exhaustion (nervousness
is another thing, and means merely
weakmindedness) is the one thing that must not
be coddled and humoured. Dr. Chapman
prescribes ice along the spine; the Wanderer
recommends sport in the Scottish wilds.

There is another question, however,
raised by the benevolent—the cruelty of
sport as blended with the sorrow of things
that feel. Now, we are not among those
enthusiasts who avouch that the fox and
hare enjoy being hunted, and that nothing
is more glorious to a red deer than being
shot on the hillside; we will yield to no
man in love for dumb things: we hold
them so dear, and have so many of them
around us. Sport, be it granted, is a
savage instinct, yet it is none the less a
natural instinct. All true sportsmen love
animals better, than do men who are not
lovers of sport. Well, as to wild shooting. It
has in our eyes this grand recommendation:
it combines a maximum of hard labour and
skill with a minimum of slaughter; for, in
the eyes of the wild shooter, a prize is
precious precisely in proportion to the difficulty
of its capture. Pheasant-shooting is like
shooting in a hen-house, partridge-shooting
(in England) is mere murder of innocents;
grouse-shooting, early in the season, is
nearly as bad; all these have for their main
object, the filling of an enormous bag. But
in wild shooting, not only are you forced
to contend with mountainous difficulties,
and are you taken into extraordinary scenes
of excitement, but you are amply satisfied
with little or nothing as a recompense.
One precious ornithological prize is " bag"
enough for a fortnight.

TENANTS OF SAINT DENIS.

IN the completion of the difficult and
delicate task of restoring the royal church
of St. Denis, will lie M. VIOLLET-LEDUC'S
chief claim to consideration as an able and
clever architect. The undertaking was one
demanding the greatest possible care,
judgment, and labour, and M. Viollet-Leduc has
brought all these to bear, with a result that
leaves nothing to be desired. It was not
merely a question of replacing displaced
tombs, raising fallen columns, and mending
statues, but the notions of former governments
had evidently been very vague and
indistinct on the subject of "restoration,"
and those notions had all tended to spoil St.
Denis rather than to improve it, so that it
has been now necessary to destroy much,
before the work of restoration could be
begun. Yet it was this disfigured church
that was the glory of the sight-seers of the
reigns of Louis the Eighteenth, Charles the
Tenth, and Louis Philippe! The lightness
and elevation of its dome were vaunted by
our fathers, yet its flooring had been raised
more than a yard above the ground, to
avoid damp; its windows had given place
to mediæval portraits of kings and abbés,
whose likeness to the originals was very
doubtful; and its tombs had been removed
into a dark, damp crypt, exposed to the
indiscretion of visitors. There were columns,
statues, and busts—some among them of
persons who had never been buried at St.
Denis—all unchronologically and
incorrectly arranged. The St. Denis of to-day
presents a very different appearance, even in
its unfinished state.

The royal mausoleum stands before us,
brilliant in renewed beauty and freshness,
and carries us back at once to the days of
its past glory. With this difference,
however; that it is now less a mausoleum than
a museum. M. Georges d'Heilly, in a very
interesting account lately published in Paris
of the extraction of the royal coffins from
St. Denis in 1793, says: "Death no longer
surrounds us when visiting St. Denis. The
tombs which once sheltered the bodies of
our kings are empty, many of them re-made,
the ashes of Dagobert and Henry the
Second thrown to the winds, and their bones
burnt in quick-lime. The fault, therefore,
of this admirable restoration is, that the
royal church is no longer a church, nor a
necropolis. It is simply a museum which
we visit, as we visit the Louvre, and the
difference between the old tombs, painted
windows, and chapels of the past, and those
of the present, which are the work of M.
Viollet-Leduc, is the difference which exists
between an admirably executed copy and an
utterly lost original.

"On the 31st of July, 1793, at a sitting
of the Convention, Barrère, in the name of
the Comité du Salut Public, read a paper
in which he proposed that the anniversary of
the 10th of August—the day on which the
throne had been levelled—should be
celebrated by the destruction of the royal tombs
of St. Denis: the sumptuousness of which, he
argued, was vanity tending to the flattery
and glory of monarchy. The Convention
unanimously gave assent to the proposition,